A Long Way Gone Memoirs Of A Boy Analysis

Doctrine into a child solider
“If the first casualty of war is innocence, them perhaps with each bullet fired, bomb detonated, leader overthrown, wall built, economy destroyed and family member killed, we are not creating goodwill and harmony, but rather another child who believes violence is the only means to bring about change in the world” Michael Franti. If kids were being turned into soldiers at a young age what kind of a world is expected? They don’t know any better than then life style that’s being taught to them. In order for the military to be able to transform these innocent children effectively into killing machines they had to use several tactics to emotionally manipulate these boys to killers. In A Long Way Gone Memoirs of a Boy …show more content…
Beah says at one point of his book, “ We watched movies at night. War movies, Rambo: First Blood, Rambo II, Commando, and so on… We all wanted to be like Rambo; we couldn’t wait to implement his techniques”(121). These movies helped them create a surreal dream like atmosphere for the soldier boys. Also the fact that they would go to to the battlefield in the middle of their movie and then come back and pick up where they had left off when they returned to their base also helped them to disconnect them from what occurred. The reality of the war would bleed onto the fiction films that they were watching. This would later have a great impact on the lives of these kids. On some occasions they wouldn’t even want to sleep since they didn’t want to face the nightmares that they knew would come to them Beah even states the following, “ The night nurse was called. She gave me some sleeping tablets, but I still couldn’t fall asleep, even after my migraine stopped. I couldn’t face the nightmares I knew would come” (160). The only way that these boys were able to confront their wartime actions was only through